Category Archives: Big Tech

The European Commission is moving fast on legislation that would change how tech giants operate in the digital marketplace.

The proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA), introduced in 2020, specifically targets the practices of "gatekeeper online platforms." Governments, including the U.S., use the term gatekeepers to describe the power that companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have over third parties that use their platforms. The Digital Markets Act was introduced alongside the Digital Services Act (DSA), complementary legislation that aims to protect users online by providing transparency into how content algorithms work.

The DMA removes the ability of tech giants to enact a preference toward their products and keep users from connecting to third parties outside their platforms. The DMA would also allow users to remove any preinstalled apps on their phones.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, will likely pass the DMA and DSA sometime before July, according to Cdric O, France's minister for digital and telecommunications. If passed this year, the legislation will be implemented in 2023 and will be applied across the EU.

"The DMA is about updating our conventional antitrust rules in order to adapt to the digital world, and the DSA is about content moderation," O said during a webinar presented by the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. "Within 18 months, Europe would have been able to propose, negotiate and adopt two of the most important texts in the history of the internet."

The DMA still needs significant work for it to be effective legislation, said Marshall Van Alstyne, professor of information systems at Boston University's Questrom School of Business.

The goals of the DMA -- to create fairness and competition -- are good ones, Van Alstyne said. However, he said the DMA is missing one essential goal: to create value.

Van Alstyne said the premise behind the DMA is the belief that market concentration is too high, making the markets less competitive, and too much of the wealth is being appropriated by large firms and not shared equitably across users and smaller firms in the digital ecosystem.

By making value the goal, "you might actually get better policy," he said.

One of the DMA policies that prevents value creation is the inability to combine data sources without explicit user opt-in, which makes it harder to create network effects. Network effects is the concept that a product or service's value increases as the number of people using that product or service increases.

One example is COVID-19 tracing, he said. "You can't really do effective COVID tracing if everyone has to explicitly go opt-in. You can't create good networks in that context."

Another is the DMA's proposed restricting of tech giants' abilities to make acquisitions. According to the DMA proposal, online platforms identified as gatekeepers would be required to report intended mergers or acquisitions to the European Commission.

While some mergers or acquisitions are problematic and should be stopped or challenged, Van Alstyne said not all mergers are bad. Indeed, large companies acquiring smaller firms can set those larger firms up to be competitors to other large firms, he said.

If you simply stop at 'the big platforms can't do this,' that's a problem. Marshall Van AlstyneProfessor, Boston University

"If you simply stop at 'the big platforms can't do this,' that's a problem," he said.

The DMA is specific on what activities big tech companies can and can't engage in, which may create issues down the road as the tech environment changes since it's not as adaptable, he said.

Van Alstyne said one of the first areas the DMA gets right is elimination of most-favored nation clauses.

Oftentimes, when large platforms contract with third parties to let them sell on their platforms, the contract terms stipulate that the third parties must offer their products at prices as good as or better than other platforms with which the third parties may do business.

Van Alsytne said that makes it hard for third parties operating on the platform to offer better prices even on their own websites.

"It makes it very hard for them to do better, and it makes the platform monopolistic," he said.

Other valuable pieces of the DMA include potentially including a concept called in situ data rights. In situ data rights gives users the power to keep their data in one location, such as Facebook, and determine what third-party companies can access that data.

Van Alstyne said providing users with in situ data rights addresses issues created by legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation, which entrenched data with companies like Facebook and Google under privacy protections.

"Startups could access the data without having to remove it from its original location, they could just get API permission and start to access large quantities of it in location," he said. "So you should be able to combine more data sets with users' permission to create more value, to create more of the network effects."

Makenzie Holland is a news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining TechTarget, she was a general reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.

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EU closes in on regulating big tech with Digital Markets Act - TechTarget

It is certainly big news when an executive leaves a big tech firm. Even bigger news when said firm happens to be the worlds biggest EV automaker with a trillion-dollar valuation, and its leader is not just the richest person on the planet, but the richest person in history.

Enter Tesla, whose head of HR, Valerie Capers Workman, has just announced she is leaving the automaker after five years. An attorney and impact leader, who worked closely with CEO Elon Musk in her role as VP of people, Workman was also a passionate diversity advocate. And as the highest-ranking black executive at Tesla, she was vocal in defending Teslas support for minorities following a number of lawsuits that exposed alleged racial abuse.

Workman is leaving Tesla to become chief legal officer of career placement startup Handshake.

This move, from the worlds top EV maker valued at US$1.036 trillion and with 70,000-plus employees, to a startup valued at US$1.5bn with just 200 employees, is reflective of a human capital movement some call it the Great Resignation that is seeing execs swapping their big tech company roles for those in much smaller tech startups.

The poster child of the movement, Jack Dorsey, famously left his position as Twitters chief executive last year to dedicate himself to his crypto startup Square, now renamed Block. But, throughout the pandemic, through 2020 and 2021, there has been an acceleration of movement from big to small tech, as executives reevaluate their lives and purpose.

In 2020, Dhivya Suryadevara left GM, where she had spent nearly 15 years, including two as CFO, to become finance chief at startup Stripe; while 16-year Google veteran Shanna Preve gave up her role leading product partnerships to becomeVP of enterprise sales and business development atfood-delivery startup DoorDash.

In 2021, this migration picked up pace. Instacart recruited four executives from public tech companies, including two from Facebook Asha Sharma, a Facebook VP, to be its COO; and Max Eulenstein, a director from Instagram, to be VP of product for the Instacart App.

And there's more. Googles former VP joined Coinbase as chief product officer; Facebooks VP of engineering Raymond Endres moved to Airtable as CTO; and Disneys top streaming executive Kevin Mayer took a leap of faith, becoming CEO of TikTok, a leap that sadly didnt work out.

Last year, ecommerce giant Amazon saw an exodus of executives leaving for startups: six departed for Nestle startup subsidiary Freshly, including the former innovation chief and chief commercialisation officer; while Amazons previous head of fulfilment operations, Jenna Owens, swapped her role for that of COO at Gamestop; and Rodrigo Brumana resigned as Amazons CFO of private-label business to join online fashion marketplace Poshmark Inc. as its new CFO.

And this exodus from Amazon has continued into 2022. Former head of marketing for Amazon Subscription Boxes, Rene Villegas, recently moved to wireless broadband startup Starry to be CMO; 12-year Amazon veteran John Curran has swapped his role as CFO for Amazons international consumer division for a chief finance role at food startup CloudKitchens; and Craig German, a 14-year executive veteran of Amazon has jumped ship to ecommerce startup Fabric, where he is now the firms first SVP of corporate marketing.

The list is almost exhaustive, especiallyconsidering we are only two weeks into 2022. So, what's going on? And why now? While just a few years ago, an executive role at Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft or Meta was highly coveted, since the onset of the pandemic, and the subsequent acceleration of tech startups and huge valuations, more and more execs are leaving the big-tech giants to pursue roles in exciting new startups.

Pandemic burnout and reevaluation and a backlash against tech companies that have grown all-powerful are among reasons cited. And then there's the fact that startups offeremployees the chance for execs to really make a splash, with many execs feeling they can have more impact and influence on a startups journey than within a huge firm. Not to mention a chance to cash in on the potential riches of startups and public companies, which are booming right now.

Here, we highlight some of the key movements from big firms to startup that have kicked-off 2022.

Former Meta and Microsoft executive Karandeep Anand has joined fintech startup Brex, as the market disruptor raises US$300m in a Series D-2 round. Joining from Meta where he led the tech giants business products group, serving more than 200 million businesses globally, Anand also spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he led the product management strategy for Microsoft's Azure cloud and developer platform efforts. Bringing extensive product leadership experience to the Brex table, Anand understands the Brex customer and knows how to build and scale business products with consumer-grade ease to meet the needs of fast-growing companies, says co-CEO Henrique Dubugras.

Big tech executive Jenny Arden joins Zillow Group as the Seattle-based real estate firms first chief design officer. An Ivy League graduate, Arden has had a 20-year career leading creative and design teams at Nike, Lyft and Airbnb. Most recently spending 16 months as VP of digital design at Nike, she also led teams at Lyft and Airbnb, and was a lead designer at Google. She has also worked in design at Dell, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. Described by Zillow Group COO Jerremy Waksman as having an impressive track record of building and designing transformative customer-facing products that provide intuitive and connected experiences, Arden will oversee the companys product design and user experience research and help to build Zillow 2.0.

Microsoft veteran Harvinder Bhela is leaving tech giant Microsoft to join hybrid cloud service startup NetApp in its newly created role of chief product officer. With 25 years at Microsoft, where he held multiple executive leadership positions, Bhela most recently served as corporate VP of the Microsoft 365 security, compliance and management business, which he grew to more than US$10bn in annual revenue, making Microsoft the largest security company in the world. Bhela is tasked with accelerating the startups transformation into a multi-cloud, storage and data services leader.

12-year Amazon veteran John Curran is swapping his role as chief financial executive for Amazons international consumer division for a CFO role at food startup CloudKitchens. This comes as the takeaway kitchen startup owned by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, triples its valuation to US$15bn following a capital raise of US$850m last November.

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Executive migration from big tech to startup picks up pace - Business Chief

The problem with tech, many declare, is its quantitative inclination, its hard math deployed in the softer human world. Tech is Mark Zuckerberg: all turning pretty girls into numbers and raving about the social wonders of the metaverse while so awkward in every human interaction that he is instantly memed. The human world contains Zuck, but it is also everything he fails at so spectacularly. That failure, the lack of social and ethical chops, is one many believe he shares with the industry with which he is so associated.

And so, because Big Tech is failing at understanding humans, we often hear that its workforce simply needs to employ more people who do understand. Headlines like Liberal arts majors are the future of the tech industry and Why computer science needs the humanities have been a recurring feature of tech and business articles over the past few years. It has been suggested that social workers and librarians might help the tech industry curb social medias harm to Black youth and proliferation of disinformation, respectively. Many anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophersespecially those with advanced degrees who are feeling the financial squeeze of academias favoring of STEMare rushing to demonstrate their utility to tech behemoths whose starting salaries would make the average humanities professor blush.

Ive been studying nontechnical workers in the tech and media industries for the past several years. Arguments to bring in sociocultural experts elide the truth that these roles and workers already exist in the tech industry and, in varied ways, always have. For example, many current UX researchers have advanced degrees in sociology, anthropology, and library and information sciences. And teachers and EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) experts often occupy roles in tech HR departments.

Recently, however, the tech industry is exploring where nontechnical expertise might counter some of the social problems associated with their products. Increasingly, tech companies look to law and philosophy professors to help them through the legal and moral intricacies of platform governance, to activists and critical scholars to help protect marginalized users, and to other specialists to assist with platform challenges like algorithmic oppression, disinformation, community management, user wellness, and digital activism and revolutions. These data-driven industries are trying hard to augment their technical know-how and troves of data with social, cultural, and ethical expertise, or what I often refer to as soft data.

But you can add all of the soft data workers you want and little will change unless the industry values that kind of data and expertise. In fact, many academics, policy wonks, and other sociocultural experts in the AI and tech ethics space are noticing a disturbing trend of tech companies seeking their expertise and then disregarding it in favor of more technical work and workers.

There have been times I was surrounded by more diversity in tech industry spaces than in the academic spaces from which the primary critiques of Big Tech derive.

Such experiences particularly make clear this fraught moment in the burgeoning field of AI ethics, in which the tech industry may be claiming to incorporate nontechnical roles while actually adding ethical and sociocultural framings to job titles that are ultimately meant to be held by the same old technologists. More importantly, in our affection for these often underappreciated soft professions, we must not ignore their limitations when it comes to achieving the lofty goals set out for them.

While it is important to champion the critical work performed by these underappreciated and under-resourced professions, there is no reason to believe their members are inherently more equipped to be the arbiters of whats ethical. These individuals have very real and important social and cultural expertise, but their fields are all reckoning with their own structural dilemmas and areas of weakness.

Take anthropology, a discipline that emerged as part and parcel of the Western colonial project. Though cultural anthropology now often espouses social justice aims, there are no guarantees that an anthropologist (85% of whom are white in the US) would orient or deploy algorithms in a less biased way than, say, a computer scientist. Perhaps the most infamous example is PredPol, the multimillion-dollar predictive policing company that Ruha Benjamin called part of The New Jim Code. PredPol was created by Jeff Brantingham, an Anthropology professor at UCLA.

Other academic communities championed by those pushing for soft data are similarly conflicted. Sociologys early surveillance and quantification of Black populations played a role in todays surveillance technologies that overwhelmingly monitor Black communities. My own research area, critical internet studies, skews very white and has failed to center concerns around race and racism. Indeed, I am often one of only a handful of Black and brown researchers in attendance at our fields conferences. There have been times I was surrounded by more diversity in tech industry spaces than in the academic spaces from which the primary critiques of Big Tech derive.

Social workers would likely add some much-needed diversity to tech. Social work is overwhelmingly performed by women and is a pretty diverse profession: over 22% Black and 14% Hispanic/Latinx. However, social workers are also implicated in state violence toward marginalized communities. For example, a social worker coauthored a controversial paper with Brantingham extending his predictive policing work to automated gang classification.

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The Humanities Can't Save Big Tech From Itself - WIRED

Baidu's metaverse concept on XiRang starts with a "Creator City" with a tall skyscraper at its center, according to this visualization shared with reporters on Dec. 21, 2021.

Baidu

The metaverse, which requires a massive amount of computing power, is set to benefit global chipmakers but other tech-related industries could also gain from it, analysts say.

Widely seen as the next generation of the internet, the metaverse refers broadly to a virtual world where humans interact through three-dimensional avatars that can be controlled via virtual reality headsets like Oculus.

Through the metaverse, users can engage in virtual activities such as gaming, virtual concerts or live sports.

The metaverse drew much attention last year, when social networking giant Facebook announced it was changing its name to Meta in October.

Big tech firms will benefit as the technologies related to that virtual world emerge, analysts said.

"The metaverse winners are really the technology companies," DBS Bank's Chief Investment Officer Hou Wey Fook told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" on Monday. Semiconductor firms would be a clear beneficiary as the metaverse will need a lot of computing power, he said.

However, the benefits to chipmakers will be "uneven," Morningstar said in a report last week.

"Since many of the tasks that take place in a 'metaverse' involve real-time processing of immense amount of data, this will require the chips involved to use advanced process nodes that are only available at TSMC, Samsung and Intel," it said.

Other main areas set to support the metaverse infrastructure that investors could consider would be firms that are supplying the "key building blocks," such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and video games graphics, said private banking firm Lombard Odier in a December report.

In such cashless, virtual environments, blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies may also play a key role. Blockchain supporting non-fungible tokens, or NFTs digital tokens that represent proof of ownership of assets such as art,collectiblesormemes could create an "interesting" ecosystem for digital content creation and monetization, the bank said.

"These could confer the right to use artworks or own creatures created in the metaverse, opening the door to a new virtual economy. In this realm, human creativity has virtually no limits," the firm said.

Facebook parentMeta, as well asApple,MicrosoftandGoogleare gearing up to release new hardware products and software servicesfor the metaverse.

In Asia, China is set to go big on the metaverse as well. Its biggest city, Shanghai, included the metaverse in its five-year development plan. The plan called for "encouraging the application of the metaverse in areas such as public services, business offices, social entertainment, industrial manufacturing, production safety and electronic games."

CNBC's Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.

Originally posted here:

Chipmakers are set to be 'winners' as the metaverse takes off - CNBC

Shares of technology and internet stocks fell on Monday, extending recent declines as investors continued to monitor a rise in Treasury yields.

Losses were widespread across the group, with megacap names, semiconductor stocks and the software sector all tumbling. The group led broad declines in the U.S. equity market, and the Nasdaq 100 Index fell more than 2 percent.

The drop came as the yield on 10-Year U.S. Treasury notes rose to 1.8 percent, the highest in almost two years. Higher rates are seen as a challenge for high-growth and relatively expensive stocks as they reduce the present value of future earnings.

Among the notable movers, Amazon.com Inc. fell 3.4 percent to trade at its lowest intraday since May. The stock has dropped about 15 percent from a November peak and is down for a fifth straight session.

Bank of America affirmed a buy rating and $4,450 price target on the stock, writing that it expects 2022 will end better than it starts. The firm has Amazon as its top megacap pick, and it expects various headwinds -- including supply chain and labor issues, decelerating e-commerce growth, and multiple compression -- will ease throughout the year.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. fell 2.8 percent and is also down a fifth day, its longest such streak since November 2019. The stock has lost about 8 percent over the five-day drop and it is trading at its lowest since October.

Among other names, Microsoft Corp fell 2.7 percent to its lowest since October. Both Microsoft and Alphabet are coming off their biggest one-week percentage drops since March 2020. Also on Monday, Apple Inc. declined 2.1 percent and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. dropped 4.5 percent. Tesla Inc. fell 2.8 percent.

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index dropped 2.4 percent. Among notable names, Nvidia Corp. dropped 5.4 percent, Advanced Micro Devices lost 3.4 percent, Marvell shed 5.1 percent, and Micron Technology dropped 2.8 percent.

Jordan Klein, a managing director at Mizuho Securities, noted that the weakness in chipmakers is following a similar slump in software names.

Could this be a sign of a much broader rotation out of tech altogether, with exposure to the best performing group in Tech during 21 now being reduced? he writes in a note. Semis, he added, carry a high relative risk if this becomes a general rotation out of tech overall where low relative valuation does not help.

The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector exchange-traded fund fell 3.2 percent on Monday. The ETF is down more than 20 percent from a November peak, touching its lowest since June.

Given the scale of the software weakness, some analysts are starting to see bargains in the group. Earlier, William Blair wrote that the rotation out of software will be short-lived as the sector continues to benefit from strong secular growth trends. Analyst Bhavan Suri is confident the software industry will exhibit durable growth and that overall business fundamentals remain intact.

2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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Amazon falls to lowest since May as Big Tech weakness continues - BetaBoston

Martha Minow and Aris Hadjipanteli| Guest columnists

Martha Minow is 300thAnniversary University Professor at Harvard University and former dean of Harvard Law School.Aris Hadjipanteli is a second-year law student.

Democrats and Republicans agree on almost nothing, not even what to call the incident a year ago at the Capitol. Was it an insurrection or a protest? But they do agree that the technology business is failing both its users and to the media industry from which it pulls so much of its content without paying for it. Its time for Congress to turn this rare consensus into action by passing the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act(JCPA) to tackle some of the consequences of techs monopoly power.

As of 2018, Google and Facebook together had nearly four times as much revenue as the entirety of the U.S. news media (TV, print, and digital). They have only grown tremendously since then. When Google users read a news story, 65 percent do not click through to the news publishers websites. Google thus disconnects news content from its sources and leaves the journalists without compensation.

For publishers to continue investing in journalism, they need fair payment in return for the significantvalue that their content provides Google and Facebook. The demand for their content remains high news organizations reach more than 135 million U.S. adults each week yet revenue produced by U.S. news publications has dropped by more than 50 percent in recent years. Readers continue to be interested in news, but the money is going to digital platforms that dont produce it.

Is it any wonder that the U.S. is now witnessing a mass exodus of journalists? Newsrooms have lost 26 percent of their positions since 2008.Local news outlets have especially suffered. During the past 15 years, more than 1,800 local newspapers have closed.Again, thats not a function of consumer sentiment. The public trusts its local newspapers more than national ones: 73 percent of U.S adults surveyed said they have confidence in their local newspaper, compared to 55 percent for national network news. Surveys show that most Americans are unaware of this crisis in local journalism.

Facebook and Google have not just used their outsized role in mediating news consumption to squeeze out newspapers. They have also altered the media landscape. To propel their own goals of addicting users, they devalue high-quality journalism in favor of provocative content and click bait that capture attention by exploiting human frailties. Facebook, according to inside and outside reports, propels untrustworthy sources and misinformation.

Rep. David Cicilline, the Rhode Island Democrat who chairs the antitrust subcommittee in the House, designed the bipartisan JCPA to give publishers new tools to right the balance in the media marketplace while also ensuring government stays away from selecting or censoring content. The bill would dramatically improve journalism companies ability to negotiate fair compensation with Big Tech: It provides a narrow safe harbor from antitrust liability that would let news publishers collectively organize and negotiate with big tech companies for fair compensation for the use of their content.

The law would guard against leaving out any news provider, regardless of size and regardless of viewpoint. And the law would ensure the big platform companies behave responsibly and bargain in good faith in part by prohibiting them from buying off individual publications at the expense of the larger group and in part through enforcing fair market value for the bargain. Equally important, the bill would ensure fair distribution of the resulting payments to small and medium sized papers.

The U.S. Constitution mentions only one private industry by name and does so to provide it explicit constitutional protection. That one industry is the press, so central to informing the electorate and allowing all residents to gain information needed for their health and welfare. The Constitution also authorizes Congress to act to advance the general welfare.

Big Tech threatens the general welfare by eviscerating the press. At this point, the power and responsibility fall both to Congress and to its bosses we, the people. Lets hope that 2022 sees action to protect the press, fair competition, and democracy.

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Opinion/Minow and Hadjipanteli: Congress must stop Big Tech's threat to the press - The Providence Journal

Fifteen years ago, on Jan. 9, 2007, I sat on the floor of a Las Vegas Convention Center entryway and pondered the iPhone. While I was running around the Consumer Electronics Show looking at the latest LG Chocolate, Steve Jobs was over at Macworld changing the world.

I'd been covering smartphones for three years by then, and they were complex gadgets for road warriors. Apple simplified the smartphone and made it a must-have for everyone.

This wasn't solely about Steve Jobs' brilliance. He struck when several other technologies were becoming available3G for the mobile web and capacitive touch screens for finger-friendly interfaces. And he worked without the legacy-software hangovers that Microsoft, Nokia, and Palm all struggled through from the first generation of proto-smartphones.

The iPhone has made a huge number of things easy, which were previously the province of techies. Mobile social networking and image sharing apps, the great 4G applications, generally came to the iPhone first throughout the early '10s, transforming how we use our devices, interact with our friends, and see our world.

But with that has come a stifling feeling of control. Two companies, Apple and Google, now control pretty much all the mobile platforms in the US; two manufacturers, Apple and Samsung, sell the vast majority of phones. Three platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, manage much of our discourse.

There are a bunch of things I didn't get right in my early iPhone analysis because I was looking at the phone that was, not at the future. (Also, Steve Jobs tended to lie.) Apple's AT&T exclusive, especially, distorted the market in ways that made the phone look less dominant and less revolutionary than it was. When I reviewed the first iPhone, I think I properly understood the importance of the new interface, but I got stuck on its lousy phone-calling quality and how it didn't support many desktop Web standards. Apple eventually fixed the phone calls, and in the battle between Apple and Flash Web sites, Apple won.

It's no coincidence that Apple's AT&T exclusive years, 2007-2011, saw a tremendous flourishing of competing consumer smartphone ideas: Palm WebOS, BlackBerry 10, and Windows Phone all rose during the time when the iPhone was influential, but boxed-in. Releasing the iPhone into the wild demanded a single competitor as bold and focused as Apple, and so now here we are in our duopoly.

It's a long way from the joyous if confusing welter of options in 2007, and I think the iPhone's ease and power have a lot to do with this.

In a lot of ways, that iPhone release helped herald in our current era of "Big Tech," where a few huge platform companies control so much of our software and services. Lots of other factors made it happen, to be sure, but Apple did a few key things to push our tech world into its current centralized state.

Back before the iPhone, carriers dictated a lot of the software preloaded on phones. A lot of that software sucked! But there were also a lot of carriers, which meant a lot of diversity and decentralization.

From 2007, I can think of AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile, Verizon; Sprint and Nextel with the same ownership but different networks; MetroPCS and Cricket, both then independent companies; US Cellular, Alltel, and Dobson Cellular One. That whole list except the Big Three is now gone.

Apple broke the carrier control over softwarein consumer's favor!by loading its own Google and Yahoo! relationships onto that first phone. Big Tech now dealt with Big Tech. And as the iPhone's influence spread, especially after it became available on all US carriers in 2011, Apple's sole power to make those deals grew.

The next step came with the iPhone 3G, which introduced the App Store. Before the App Store, people bought their (relatively few) apps either from several independent stores, like Handmark, or from their carriers. In 2007, there were many more US wireless carriers than today, which meant much less centralized control there, too.

Now, if you buy apps in the US, it's almost always from one of two places: Apple or Google. Other stores exist for the Android platform, but they're little used in the US except on Amazon's proprietary tablets.

I once read, somewhere, that humans' favorite form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is, those are hard to find because power corrupts. Apple's mostly benevolent dictatorship has been great for a lot of little guys over the years.

Having a single, clean API and a single store let software developers focus on making money, and it made apps easy to discover. Having a single interface shared by tens of millions of people let network effects spread the smartphone gospel, as people could share tips, tricks, and help with their friends and family.

Of course, dissidents don't fare well under even benevolent dictatorships. Folks who wanted features or customization that Apple wasn't on board with were largely cut out.

We're very much now living in a world the iPhone madea world of user-friendly, strictly controlled platforms in the grip of a small number of private companies.

And honestly, I don't see how that changes. The current froth over "Web3" and distributed organizations misses what made the iPhone great: simplicity and ease. Given a complex, difficult system like the new blockchain-based systems versus Apple's simple user interfaces, policies, and guidance, consumers will almost certainly pick ease of use.

When the first iPhone came out, I saw it as a revolution. Revolutions, history tells us, often resolve into monarchies. Will the wheel turn again?

Be sure to check outMy Reporting Notes From the Original iPhone Launch 15 Years Ago andThe Top 5 iPhones of All Time.

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15 Years Ago, the iPhone Created 'Big Tech' - PCMag

Every month, Facebook attracts 2.89 billion active users. Every minute there are hundreds of thousands of comments and status updates. Each could be discussing anything, including extremist views, or the sale of endangered wildlife across continents.

Social media platforms have enabled wildlife traders to connect as never before. Some operate legally, within the boundaries of international laws. Others are less scrupulous. Illegal traders use private chats and groups to bypass middlemen and exchange information on how to evade law enforcement. They use the ecosystem of public and private channels on social media platforms to sell wildlife as pets or luxury artefacts. Public posts enable traders to connect with a potentially vast global customer base, but arrangements for payments and shipping, and conversations about what else may be available, can be quickly directed to private messaging services.

Some platforms have introduced strong community standards prohibiting attempts to buy or sell endangered wildlife and private sales of live animals. But it takes only seconds to find, for example, endangered parrots for sale. Dig a little deeper and you can find posts featuring wholesale quantities of parrots captured from the wild for export, in what would be clear violations of international laws.

Tackling this is critical: the wildlife trade poses a major threat to global biodiversity. It can also contribute to the spread of infectious zoonotic (passed from animal to human) diseases.

In a recent study published in the journal Conservation Biology, we examined the online behaviour of wildlife traders based in West Africa. We wanted to explore how researchers and moderators can use information scattered across different parts of social media platforms to detect posts selling wild birds.

Some of the trade we studied is permitted under international agreements. But its scale and scope, which is discussed in a forthcoming parallel study, has conservationists concerned. Trade in wild parrots from West Africa has also been linked to the global spread of infectious diseases. Some of the exporting countries in this study, Mali, Cte d'Ivoire and Senegal among them, are working to contain highly pathogenic strains of avian influenza.

Working with ornithologists, conservationists and legal analysts, we were able to identify over 80 different species in trade, some of which are highly threatened and prohibited from commercial trade under international law. Species ranged from parrots and hornbills to songbirds and doves.

We detected 400 social media posts made by known bird traders featuring or promoting birds in trade.

The majority (80%) did not contain explicit text that could be used to determine that the posts were intended to facilitate the sale of wildlife, violating platform community standards.

The application of simple algorithms searching for words such as for sale, or the names of target species, would help detect some of this activity. But admins in some closed Facebook groups have advised their members to avoid using certain key words. This means a significant amount of trade would pass under the radar of key word algorithms.

Read more: Reptiles: one in three species traded online and 75% aren't protected by international law

However, our research found that the triangulation of information available elsewhere both within and beyond social media platforms could be used to make powerful inferences about how posts facilitate trade, violate platform standards and signpost illicit activity. Such information may be found in elements such as images, profile descriptions or comments. This is why its important that experts be involved in monitoring social media for potentially illegal trade: they have the knowledge to identify the species involved and contextualise the activity within international and domestic regulations.

Different wildlife products are bought and sold in different locations online and in different ways. There is no one size fits all solution for detecting wildlife traded online, let alone all illicit and harmful goods.

Read more: Five reasons people buy illegal wildlife products and how to stop them

Our study, however, establishes a framework for thinking about how different sectors of illicit or harmful activity can be understood and monitored and moderated more effectively. Careful analyses, led by experts in specific fields, can help in the design of algorithms and approaches to moderation tailored to the situation.

Our study happened against the backdrop of major global discussions about how best to regulate social media platforms. New regulatory legislation is being planned or coming into play in major economies including China, the US, the EU, Australia and the UK, aimed at cajoling and coercing big tech to do more to protect users from harmful content.

Regulators are mindful of the need to balance the harms and benefits of the brave new world ushered in by social media. Designing moderation practices that make a meaningful impact on the vast amount of wildlife traded on the internet is no trivial undertaking. But it is clear that greater action is needed.

We propose that the solutions lie with tech firms working closely with subject matter experts to design moderation practices tailored to the trade in different species across regions. Regulators, tasked with determining if tech firms are fulfilling their duty of care (as proposed in the UKs draft Online Safety Bill), should similarly engage with subject matter experts to ensure that tech firms approaches are fit for purpose.

Carefully designed algorithms that can intelligently triangulate across multiple data sources will be part of the solution. Manual analysis will also be critical. In our study, knowing which species were in trade and the relevant local legislation was critical for understanding legality. But such tasks lie beyond the abilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Collaborations and partnerships between tech firms and subject matter experts remain in their infancy. But cleverly designed legislation, savvy regulators and investment from tech firms are needed to drive solutions forward at pace.

Alisa Davies, a wildlife trade specialist at the World Parrot Trust, contributed to this article and was a co-author of the research it is based on.

Excerpt from:

Big tech, regulators and conservationists must unite to tackle online wildlife trade - The Conversation CA

A few years ago, an ambitious young entrepreneur made a big claim: she was developing technology that could diagnose illnesses from a drop of blood.

lizabeth Holmes of Theranos dazzled investors with her pitch, dressing up like Steve Jobs and talking a perfect game.

As we now know, there was no ground-breaking technology. Holmes, who was faking it rather than making it, has now been convicted on several counts of fraud.

The episode, which captured the imagination of the world, has shone the spotlight on a darker side of startup ethics how far can you stretch your startups claims of potential when looking for money? Is it still okay to fake it until you make it?

Joining Adrian to compare stories and discuss the issue is seasoned startup advisor Donal Cahalane.

Continue reading here:

The Big Tech Show: Learning lessons from Theranos - is it okay for startups to fake it until they make it? - Independent.ie

For something that doesnt exist yet, web3 sure is getting a lot of people riled up.

Its on the tip of tongues these days in Silicon Valley. Tech scions are fighting about web3 on social media. Investors last year shoveled $30 billion into startups premised on it. And bright engineers are leaving cushy jobs at companies such as Facebook to get in early.

The very idea that theres a new frontier on the internet even has people paying millions of dollars for digital tokens themed around cartoon apes.

But so far, web3 has been more like a buzzword thats designed more to confuse than to illuminate, and its causing something like an identity crisis for the tech industry with implications for the rest of us.

Its short for Web 3.0. Its sometimes spelled with a capital W, but usually not.

The thinking goes that Web 1.0 was the first World Wide Web that took off in popularity through web browsers in the 1990s, and that Web 2.0 followed a decade later with the rise of mega platforms like Google and Facebook.

Most mentions of web3 treat it as an umbrella term, a vision of the future of the internet where ownership and power are more widely distributed. This vision is based on transparent digital ledgers known as blockchains (the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies), and it supposes that Big Tech will be rivaled by more democratic forms of internet governance where you, the user, will get a say maybe even a vote in big decisions about how platforms run.

But that definition strikes many people as pretty vague.

Tech magnate Elon Musk, the worlds wealthiest person, was recently at a loss when he tried to figure out what web3 was. Seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now, he wrote on Twitter last month.

In short, many technologists (not to mention plenty of users) worry that a handful of tech CEOs have a lot of power. The likes of YouTube, Instagram and Twitter are the hosts for a huge proportion of online content, including political speech, and those companies get to decide who gets banned. They also hoard huge amounts of data and take an increasing share of Silicon Valleys revenue.

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Its a situation that no one except maybe stockholders is really happy about, and it wasnt supposed to be this way.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity, activist John Perry Barlow wrote in his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

Software engineers have been toying for years with alternatives. Think of the standardized, open nature of email, but for social media. So far, though, services like Mastodon, which is similar to Twitter but without a central server, havent caught fire. Twitter is tinkering with its own distributed social media project called Bluesky.

If web3 is unproved, why the optimism?

The cause of the optimism is the development of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital forms of money are the most concrete examples that exist of an all-online, no-one-in-charge, blockchain-based system.

And as the perceived value of those coins took off last year, with the total value of the market passing $3 trillion in November, so has the expectation that the decentralized model can be applied to other areas of online life. If Bitcoin can work, so the thinking goes, why not other blockchain-based financial products like insurance or loans?

Crypto is not only the future of finance but, as with the internet in the early days, is poised to transform all aspects of our lives, Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm thats betting big on web3, said last year.

The firm defines web3 as the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens. And a token, in this sense, is like a deed of ownership for a small piece of the internet, whether thats an object in a video game or anything someone else might value, like art.

Maybe well all soon own lots of tokens, each one for something different and all rising in value over time, or so the thinking goes.

Thats what web3 evangelists say. But one high-profile tech founder recently threw cold water on all the preaching.

You dont own web3, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of companies Twitter and Block, tweeted last month. Instead, he said, the investor class will own it, as usual. It will never escape their incentives. Its ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.

Dorsey, who days earlier had been Exhibit A in a Wall Street Journal column about web3 revolutionaries, said in a burst of tweets that he had never been a part of web3 and he called for massive investment in free, open-source software. (Dorsey is nevertheless a Bitcoin booster who has said it may help to deliver world peace.)

His posts angered a few people. Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz blocked Dorsey on Twitter, causing a mini soap opera in the tech world.

But the early winners of web3 may in fact be big businesses. Non-fungible tokens that people are buying and selling as art including those cartoon ape tokens need to be traded in a marketplace somewhere, and OpenSea, one such marketplace, was recently valued at $13.3 billion. (Andreessen Horowitz is an OpenSea investor.)

A number of venture capital firms now specialize in crypto investments, and they put more money into cryptocurrency and blockchain startups last year than they ever had before, according to estimates from Crunchbase and Pitchbook, two research firms.

One venture capital firm, Coinbase Ventures, affiliated with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, made 100 different investments last year, according to Crunchbase. The startups include an Indonesian website for buying cryptocurrency and an online marketplace for buying video clips of gaming streamers. Like startups generally, most are just beginning to explore business models.

Remember those tokens were all reputedly going to have with web3? Each of those might come with voting rights.

The best example so far is a group that formed in November with the idea of crowdsourcing a pot of money to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution at auction. The term for this kind of group is decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and the group was called Constitution DAO. That off-the-wall caper failed, but if the group had succeeded, its plan was to vote on a plan to publicly display the document.

Another recently formed DAO plans to buy a golf course, with contributors getting voting rights as in a country club.

The appeal of web3 the money or the idealistic talk, or both is big enough that top engineers are jumping ship from so-called web2 companies.

Two of Facebooks top engineers on its blockchain and digital currency project left the company to join Andreessen Horowitzs crypto team in October, CNBC reported. They cited the investment firms track record of advancing the entire crypto ecosystem a more expansive mission than they had at Facebook. And last month, a vice president at Facebooks parent company Meta left for OpenSea.

Its not exactly a brain drain, but the pace seems to be picking up.

The future is always uncertain, but the tech industry is generally on the leading edge and the buzz around crypto is unmistakable, whether its a bubble or not.

Benedict Evans, a London-based tech investor, wrote this month that the crypto world is characterized by both irrational, religious hype and straw-man attacks. And he said it has helped to shift the center of gravity in tech away from, say, smartphones or social media.

Crypto is so big and potentially important, and yet so vague and so early, that we cant even agree what to call it, he said, without using the term web3.

There are other hot tech sectors including gaming, autonomous cars and virtual reality, Evans said but theres likely little that could cool off web3 hype in the immediate future without a regulatory intervention from Washington or elsewhere. Other countries, including China, have cracked down on Bitcoin mining, for example.

Still, a few more actual products would help the cause of web3 proponents.

So far: mostly debate. The Biden administration is weighing cryptocurrency regulations, and in December, Congress held hearings on possible regulation of cryptocurrencies and by extension, all the potential tokens of web3.

What do you say to the folks that say this doesnt seem like a new financial system per se but an expansion of the old one? asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

One of last weeks witnesses, Brian Brooks, was a former Trump administration official whos now CEO of blockchain tech company Bitfury. And other former government officials are being snapped up by none other than Andreessen Horowitz as part of a lobbying blitz to rewrite regulations around cryptocurrency.

Andreessen Horowitz is also predicting voters may favor pro-crypto candidates. Web3 has emerged as a major political force, it said last month, based on one survey it paid for.

See the rest here:

Why Big Tech's best and brightest are jumping ship to web3 - Yahoo News